Why are you so competitive?
I enjoy Foursquare. It’s a way of sharing my daily life with people, and they’re sharing with me. I mostly only connect with people I know on Foursquare, so I’ve had lots of cases where I saw someone checked in nearby, texted them, and we hung out.

Remember back to the glory days of 2009? Sure, the economy was in deeper shit
than the kid from Slumdog Millionaire
and all that boring stuff. But at least the world made some kind
of sense. We had a new president who promised to bring about
change. We knew Kanye was never going to stop being a douchebag. We knew that
Oompa-Loompas never left Wonka's chocolate factory.

It's not online yet, but the February edition of WIRED magazine -- a special issue devoted to the underworld -- has a long piece about Mohan Srivastava, a "geological statistician" who used some very simple math that exposed a major flaw in certain types of scratch tickets. The gist of it is that by reading what's on the outside of an unscratched card, he can tell the winners from the losers.

There are far too few advocates in the world for teenagers navigating the difficulties of dealing with shit IRL, and even fewer who give a shit about how teens actually relate in digital spaces. As for researchers who manage to make sense about the way real life and digital life interact -- well, there's pretty much only one must-read digital ethnographer, and that's Boston's DANAH BOYD

With the publication of his 2004 book "We the Media,"
Dan Gillmor established himself as one of the most important thinkers
in digital journalism. Because of that book, Gillmor, a former
technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is often described
as the leading advocate for citizen journalism, though he would be the
first to point out it's more complicated than that.

You may recall Travis Corcoran, erstwhile blogger and founder of the online comics store heavyink.com, the guy who saw fit to post some advice to would-be assassins immediately after the Giffords shooting. Under the title "1 down, 534 to go" Corcoran wrote (on his now-defunct blog):

It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot “indiscriminately”.

OK,
sure, wading through acres of white stuff en route to the T was a pain
-- but at least I didn't have to clear an entire tree off my Red Line
seat. Poor Toyota FJ Cruiser. (Then again, it was basically built for this kind of thing, right?)

Whenever something really appalling happens -- the kind of thing that ought to shock us all out of our petty factions and unite us in horror and grief -- somebody always has to step up to show us how cool they are by being an asshole about it.

This week, that asshole is Travis Corcoran, a/k/a tjic, founder of the Arlington-based heavyink.